"Love... it surrounds every being and extends slowly to embrace all that shall be"
About this Quote
The verbs do the heavy lifting. “Surrounds” makes love spatial and inescapable; it’s not earned, not chased, not performed. “Extends slowly” adds time and patience, a corrective to modern love’s adrenaline fantasies and to the impatient, transactional logic of relationships. This is love as gradual widening, not instant certainty. The phrase “every being” deliberately overreaches: humans, yes, but also the living world, maybe even the unliving. Gibran’s mystical streak turns affection into cosmology.
Then the line slips into the future tense: “shall be.” That old, biblical register isn’t decorative; it smuggles in inevitability. Love becomes not merely what we feel but what history bends toward, an eschatological promise that the arc of existence is, however slowly, an embrace.
Context matters. Writing in the early 20th century as a Lebanese-American poet shaped by Christian mysticism, Sufism, and Romanticism, Gibran offered an antidote to an era of rupture (migration, industrial modernity, war). The subtext is consoling but not naive: the world may look fractured, but connection is the deeper law, working on a longer timeline than our panic.
Quote Details
| Topic | Love |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
| Cite |
Citation Formats
APA Style (7th ed.)
Gibran, Kahlil. (2026, January 18). Love... it surrounds every being and extends slowly to embrace all that shall be. FixQuotes. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/love-it-surrounds-every-being-and-extends-slowly-17082/
Chicago Style
Gibran, Kahlil. "Love... it surrounds every being and extends slowly to embrace all that shall be." FixQuotes. January 18, 2026. https://fixquotes.com/quotes/love-it-surrounds-every-being-and-extends-slowly-17082/.
MLA Style (9th ed.)
"Love... it surrounds every being and extends slowly to embrace all that shall be." FixQuotes, 18 Jan. 2026, https://fixquotes.com/quotes/love-it-surrounds-every-being-and-extends-slowly-17082/. Accessed 12 Feb. 2026.










